Strange and surreal stories about happenings on Earth, and the people that live on it

Thursday, April 7, 2011

The Collyer brothers

Homer and Langley Collyer were compulsive hoarders during the 1940s. For decades, neighborhood rumors swirled around the rarely seen, unemployed men and their home at 2078 Fifth Avenue, in Manhattan, where they obsessively collected newspapers, books, furniture, musical instruments, and many other items They even set up booby-traps in corridors and doorways to protect against intruders.

After an anonymous tip called that there was a dead body in the Collyer house, and much initial difficulty getting in, the police found Homer Collyer dead and Langley no where to be found. About two weeks later, after removing nearly 100 tons of garbage from the house, workers found Langley Collyer’s partialy decomposed body just 10 feet away from where they had found his brother.Langley had been crawling through their newspaper tunnel to bring food to his paralyzed brother when one of his own booby traps fell down and crushed him. Homer, blind and paralyzed, starved to death several days later.

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comments:

My friend told me about these guys after he heard this story on NPR. It's so frightening, hoarding behavior. I've come across it once while doing some mission work when I still cared about that stuff. This old woman had a paralyzed son and they lived in rural Georgia. The yard was a literal dump. She buried trash in the backyard and when we tried to remove it so we could fix up her place, she'd go and bury it again when we weren't looking.

I can't bring myself to watch that A&E show about hoarding, looks too painful.